If you believe that all that stands in the way of quality education is better pay for teachers you’ll have your opinion confirmed by reading Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers by Daniel Moulthrop, Ninive Clements Calegari and Dave Eggers (The New Press, 2006).

If you’re not already persuaded, however, this book may make you less inclined to believe that “better schools begin with better pay.”

Moulthrop, a radio reporter, and Calegari are both former classroom teachers. Eggers is the founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit providing free literacy and literary arts services for young people, and Calegari is its founding executive director. Interestingly, 826 Valencia’s programs are provided by unpaid volunteers.

Teachers Have It Easy begins by debunking myths about education. The tone of this section sounds like a teenager’s “Why do I have to? Nobody else has to” whine. The authors appear to think nobody but teachers have to pay to take continuing education classes, nobody else works more than their contract hours, nobody else in a high stress job goes without “a good deal of time off” as compensation. I’ve been a teacher; it was hard, long, and stressful. But whining about how tough teaching is does not convince anyone who hasn’t do it.

As proof that better pay produces better teaching, the authors point to studies by the Education Trust about the effect of high quality instruction on student performance. Note that language: The correlation that was studied was instructional quality and student performance, not teacher pay and student performance. If there’s a study that proves the more you pay teachers the more students learn, I didn’t find it cited in this book.

The bulk of the book is a series of stories about teachers, would-be-teachers and used-to-be-teachers. These are supposed to show the caliber of people who are not becoming teachers because of the poor pay. Reading the stories, I was inclined to think many of them were not people I wanted teaching.

The final part of Teachers Have It Easy is devoted to profiles of districts that “start paying teacher more.” Reading past the headline, however, it’s clear that none of the success stories began by increasing teacher pay. All began by restructuring the teacher workforce through changes in hiring/budgeting/instructional policies, professional development standards, and then by changes in the way teachers were paid.

In Denver schools, for example, teachers were paid to learn how to write objectives and use them in their classroom. One former teacher, currently a principal, says she never knew objectives were useful; she had been in education for 36 years. I don’t think someone would last 36 years in a hotel housekeeping position without knowing how to clean a toilet. How could someone rise through the ranks to a supervisory position in education without knowing the instructional equivalent of cleaning a toilet?

Although Moulthrop, Calegari and Eggers fail to prove their thesis that better pay for teachers results in better education for students, they do make the case for paying good teachers well. Indirectly, they also make a case for greatly improved teacher education programs to prepare new teachers to do a better job from their first day in the classroom with instruction in basic skills like how to write an objective.